The majority of children who are taken into care in the UK are placed in foster families, and in the past a carer's main concern has been to provide for the child's physical and emotional needs. During the last five years, there has been growing concern to find ways both of increasing the likelihood of carers engaging in educational activities with their children, and of raising the levels of educational achievement of the children using interventions outside school as well as in school. Several studies have established that that the educational standards achieved by children in public care in the UK are lower than should be expected (Jackson 1994; SSI/Ofsted 1997; Fletcher-Campbell 1997). The Department for Children, Families and Schools has expressed its wish to strengthen educational provision for children in care in several reports, culminating in a White Paper, "Care Matters: Time for Change" (2007). In the light of these findings, funding from the DCSF provided for a two-year pilot of the "Letterbox Club", an intervention targeting reading and number with children aged 7 to 11, working with 50 local authorities spread across England in 2007 and 2008. The intervention followed a pattern set by an earlier small-scale development project. Every child who becomes a member of the "Letterbox Club" receives a parcel once a month for six months. The parcel is addressed to the child not their carer, at their residential address not their school, and contains reading books, stationery items and a maths game at the child's own level of attainment. It was hoped that many carers would join in by reading or playing games with the children, but there was no assumption that this was required. The pilot explored three key issues in relation to the children receiving these materials: in general terms, how the children used the materials provided, and with whom; more specifically, the potential for improvements in the children's achievements in reading and number; and finally the impact on the level and nature of the foster carers' educational support for the children. This paper concentrates on identifying the key features that contributed to the intervention being successful, leading to its adoption across the UK for over 4500 children in 2009 (ie over 75% of children in the eligible age range).

The project worked with 540 children in 2007 and 900 in 2008. The Letterbox parcels were delivered over a period that included over eight weeks of school holiday. The project's impact was investigated using mixed methods. Reading ages were tested pre and post the intervention (using Neale, 1997); a high proportion of the children had reading ages more than a year below their chronological age at the start of the intervention, and the choice of books for the parcels was adapted accordingly. A specially devised test for number (related to the English National Curriculum) was also administered before and after children had the Letterbox parcels. Children and carers were given questionnaires about the contents of the parcels after they had received the first three and the last three parcels. A small sample of children and carers were interviewed after the intervention was complete. Local authority lead teachers were interviewed.

Full test results were returned for 316 children in 2007; reading and maths scores improved by more than was predicted compared to national norms, for a cohort of children whose progress had been slow previously. Questionnaires from 221 children showed high levels of satisfaction with the contents of the parcels, and that children had engaged carers, siblings and other family contacts in reading and using the maths activities. The key features of the project, likely to be relevant to any similar intervention with vulnerable children, included these: the materials were addressed to the child not the carer; the choice of books paid attention to interesting both the child and carer; number activities were matched to the child's level of attainment; activities could be undertaken in just a short time; the parcels came over a sustained period of time, and children were expected to decide for themselves how to use them.